As computer systems evolve into media centers in households, the computer systems are tasked with greater media processing workloads. Previously, add-in graphics cards and physics accelerators have been included to aid in the graphics processing. In addition, host processors are also being designed to more efficiently execute graphics applications.
A very common graphics calculation includes sampling a texture. Texture sampling often refers to determining a texture color for a texture mapped pixel, by interpolating the colors of nearby pixels of textures (texels). As an example, an average of two texels around a target texel are averaged to determine the target texel. However, the interpolation process often consumes a large number of execution cycles. As a result, a processor pipeline computing the texture sample may stall, which results in an expensive cost in execution cycles. In the alternative, more hardware threads may be included on a processor to execute other software threads to mask the stall; however, even on a processor with multiple hardware threads is still impacted by stalls associated with texture sampling. Furthermore, the cost of replicating hardware threads on a processor becomes expensive to mask an inefficient method of handling texture sampling.